'Santa' gives gift of hope

I stumbled upon Christmas recently. It was right out there on the streets of Phoenix.

It was in the face of a homeless woman named Cynthia and in the tears of a teenager named Diego. I saw it at a Salvation Army thrift store and in the toy aisle at a Walmart where a mother of six was shopping, though her basket was empty and her face just a little sad.

"It's tough, isn't it," I said, as I approached her in the aisle.

"You have no idea," she replied.

She was right. I didn't have any idea what I was in for when I ventured out recently with Secret Santa. I thought we were out there, roaming the city to hand out hundred-dollar bills.

Turns out it was so much more than that.

It's a holiday tradition that began 25 years ago when a Kansas City man began walking the streets, anonymously giving $100 bills to strangers. This, in repayment for a kindness once offered him when he desperately needed it. By the time he died in 2007, Larry Stewart had given away $1.3 million, and on his deathbed, he recruited a friend to continue the tradition.

That friend -- Secret Santa, the sequel -- is a most jolly old elf, with snow-white hair and twinkling blue eyes that light up at the prospect of sprinkling a little magic into the desert air. He came to Phoenix recently, where he rendezvoused with his Arizona operation, a locally recruited Santa and a 15-seat van full of elves in red flat caps. Among them was Luis Gonzales and his wife, Christine, and Larry McCormick and Steve Chenoweth, a pair of retired FBI agents who organize the event.

Since 2006, the elf pack has hit the streets every December, escorted by Phoenix police as they scour the city for people in need of a lift. Some elves are wealthy, some not. Some set aside money all year long to be able to make this "sleigh ride."

This year, they invited me to come along, and the Kansas City Santa joined us, having recently returned from a similar ride though Staten Island in New York, site of Superstorm Sandy devastation.

Our first stop was at 11th Street and Glendale, where Sal Jiminez was wielding a leaf blower. His reaction was one we would see all day long -- first, suspicion as he was approached by strangers, then disbelief as a hundred-dollar bill was tucked into his hand. And then came the joy, which would at times be a shriek of jubilation but was mostly a softer, quiet response of amazement and tears.

As Secret Santa departed -- asking only that Sal do his own act of kindness in repayment -- I asked the stunned landscaper what he would do with the money.

"Buy something to eat," he told me. "Something for my kids or grandkids. But first, praise the Lord."

Sheryl German was sitting on a bus bench near 17th Avenue and Glendale. She and two friends spend most of their days there. Nights, they sleep outside a nearby medical building. Sheryl is bipolar and tells me she's been on the streets for three years. She gets counseling, she says, but she's "not ready" for housing.

Most days, she is right there on the bench, in full view of the drivers who whiz by, but so often unseen. She has, she said, no place else to go.

"What I've been through, this means everything," she said through tears as she stared at the hundred-dollar bill. "I've been abused out here on the street. It just makes you kind of give up on humanity. Then, people like you come along."

They come along to a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store to find Tammy Wright, who is looking for work and was worried sick about how she would get to interviews once her bus pass expired later that week. To an elementary school in west Phoenix, to find Francisca Quinoñez, a cafeteria worker who, through tears, tells me that she can now get a few gifts for her children this year.

To Melissa Espinosa, standing outside the school with three of her four children. Even at this time of year, luxuries -- you know, things like clothes -- are beyond reach. Her twin 3-year-old sons are dressed in pajamas.

"Once in awhile, the church comes through the apartment complex and hands out clothes," she said.

That, however, hasn't happened in a while. Her plan for the money? "Go and buy them some sweaters and jackets."

Pamela Klip also will spend the money on her son. He was killed by a hit-and-run driver on Veteran's Day. The $100, she says, will allow her to put flowers on his grave and restock the candles at his streetside memorial.

Lily Gonzales, a cashier at a northwest Phoenix Mexican restaurant, had to put nursing school on hold in October, after her stepfather was arrested on suspicion of murdering her mother.

Lily has seven younger brothers and sisters, and together with her aunt, she is now caring for them. She is 24. Secret Santa peels off $100 bills, one for each child and one for Lily, who quietly cries as the money is pressed into her palm, bill by bill.

"Even a simple hug for me means a lot right now," she told me. "The money, it's something that comes from their hearts, and that means a lot."

As it turns out, it meant everything to many of the people we met on the streets of Phoenix, people who showed me that it wasn't hundred-dollar bills we were handing out, after all, but something far more important. In a city this size, it's easy to be invisible, to be alone. Then along comes a stranger, handing out hope and humanity and perhaps, for some, the beginning of healing.

Mere money comes and goes, but kindness and the human connection? That's the gift that remains, on both ends of that hundred-dollar bill.

And that is the message of Secret Santa, one he spreads not just at Christmas but all year long.

"It's about the random act of kindness and the hope it gives people and it can change their lives," he told me. "It's about the human spirit, about lifting the human spirit. The money is just the tool."

It's a funny thing about that tool: It works on both he who receives it and he who gives it.

Some of the biggest smiles I saw were on the faces of the people handing out the hundred-dollar bills. Kindness, it seems, is not only contagious, it's addicting.

"You're never the same. You're hooked," a local businessman told me. "I get more out of it than the recipient. When you give that amount, you're letting them know that there's hope, that there are people who care. I've been doing it seven years. I'm in until I die."

One of the best stops of our day came when Secret Santa asked the police to pull over a city bus. The riders were stunned and possibly a bit scared as we noisily piled onto the bus.

Cynthia Bennekaa dissolved into tears as Secret Santa approached. Her last apartment was condemned several months ago for health reasons, and she's been homeless since then, lacking the down payment on a new place.

"You have no idea," she said quietly, staring at her hundred-dollar bill while all around her riders clapped and cheered. "It'll help me find a home."

Yolanda Banda was headed to the hospital to visit her daughter, who is struggling to hold on to a pregnancy.

"This means I can buy her something nice," a beaming Yolanda said. "I can make her smile today."

But the moment that will remain with me is the moment I spent with 17-year-old Diego Velasco, who poured out his story in an explosion of tears as we briefly sat together on that bus on the side of the street. Diego lost his mother last month to cancer, and he's working hard to hang on, to stay in school and graduate as she would have wanted. He's a junior at Ombudsman High School, and the money, he says, will go toward clothes and expenses.

"I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I wasn't expecting it," he says, over and over, as he clings to me and cries. And I know, as he holds me tight, that it's not so much the money he's talking about.